Parking management is often underrated by most business owners, but dive deep into the real answer and you’ll find out that it’s an important area that's often missed. Why? Well, the answer is because of speed and time management as well as staff and customer satisfaction.
You don’t want to lose time, do you? Nor do you want your employees to be late when urgent work needs to be done. Parking management helps you avoid these issues and ensures everyone is on time and ready to serve customers as well as ensuring your customers can physically reach you. However, there’s more to it than just that.
In this article, we will go into why parking management is essential for you as a business owner.
5 Reasons parking management is vital for your business
1. It saves you money
Having to always find additional parking is not only making you waste extra fuel, but it’s also troubling you in expenses. Every parking lot might have different prices, so this is quite an issue.
The reason is that employees and customers will have trouble finding parking, especially if you live in a busy town or city. Changing parking spots daily is not the most pleasant thing to do; you are losing tickets, and plenty of parking lots may charge more than the rest. It’s not good for your wallet, to say the least.
However, once you have a parking management system, everybody can have their own parking spot. Not only does this save everyone money in the long-term, but they also won’t have to worry about what the cost of their parking spot may be or if they parked in the right spot or not.
2. You don’t have to worry about parking spaces
The sad part about parking spaces is that sometimes, most business owners don’t have solutions to lack of parking space. Parking space is just as important as anything else when you are trying to get something finished or are late to work. Nevertheless, poor usage of parking spaces is one of the most common issues globally. This isn’t tolerable when you are living in a busy area.
Research shows that poor parking and infrastructure usage results in revenue loss.
Bad parking will often create a higher traffic jam and even show others that your parking management system is poor. A parking management system solves this issue by correctly optimizing parking space. Thus, you aren’t only maximizing spaces available but letting people know how long they can park, where they need to park and how they need to park.
3. Increases customer satisfaction
When customers can easily find a spot to park, it’s probably one of the best feelings in the world. Especially if you are living in an area with massive traffic jams, having a spot to park seems like a gift. Nevertheless, this is more important if you are a restaurant or retail store owner.
What’s the wrong side of people not finding a spot? Usually, it’ll make customers angry and have them not coming back the next time! Something you don’t want to risk doing.
4. Privacy
This is primarily important for those living in a private building. What’s worse than getting back from work and finding out someone has taken your parking spot. Especially when you are living in that area, this gets annoying to experience every day. Therefore, private parking owners must be accountable for this and effectively manage parking spots.
The best way to reserve parking spots for private residents is to leave a sign of users who can park there. Alternatively, you can add a tow sign for those who park without authorization. According to statistics, people spend an average of 17 hours per year searching for parking.
However, the real question is if you own a business near residential areas, you can try and manage parking spaces by not disturbing any private parking spots. A parking management system will allow you to charge people monthly fees they can pay in the residential areas, which is cheaper than paying daily.
For instance, there are parking lots that have valets. Valets are great for not allowing unauthorized users to enter a parking lot. However, whether you see it’s a good idea to use one is up to you.
5. Much better return on investment (ROI)
Parking management systems are an excellent investment that will bring you profits in the long run. Not only does it improve parking efficiency, but it also helps customers not waste any time trying to park their vehicles. These systems are excellent for attracting customers and trying to increase profits.
Additionally, parking management systems reduce long-term costs by using advanced technological features. Therefore, you’ll be able to achieve results that’ll bring you profits and increase your ROI in your business.
The impact a good parking management system can have on your business success
It’s not too difficult to distinguish between an insufficient parking space and a good one, but let’s find out why a good parking management system can impact your business success. There are two primary ways:
- Revenue: When consumers come to your area to park and constantly struggle with finding a free spot, guess what’ll happen? They’ll start searching for alternatives. Thus, making you lose revenue in the long term.
- Charging: Nothing is free, and neither should parking be. Maybe you are the owner of a restaurant, a bar, or some other kind of business and own a parking lot; you may be thinking about whether you should charge people. Well, charging a small amount for parking can allow you to gather revenue. However, if you charge for parking, you should remember that your parking management system should also be at the top of the line.
3 Ways to solve the lack of parking spots available
1. Manual management
There are plenty of easier ways to manage parking instead of manually. When the budget is tight and your parking lot is small, it is an effective way. Manual management can be effective in many ways; some are:
- Allow people to assign spaces to each other on the days they aren’t using them. You can let them agree or even personally communicate it through.
- Implement the “first come, first served” method.
- Allow employees to agree on the parking spots they’ll be taking.
Manual management might be a nightmare so everyone will turn to parking management software.
2. Parking Management Software
For a long time, parking has been a problem for employers. However, parking management software has brought enlightenment for these types of issues. It’s a world-class solution mainly used to solve parking issues for large and small areas. This is an innovative solution for business owners, office managers and experienced professionals.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, most of the workforce shifted to remote working. With the workforce shifting to remote working, can the company afford an area of large parking that remains empty?
Parking management software allows you to monitor who should be at the office and when. The software can effectively manage parking spaces. The best part about this is that you can tell the software how they can prioritize staff members and identify who needs the parking the most.
Other excellent parking benefits of parking management software include reporting and gathering valuable data.
3. Consider renting more space
For a long time, it’s been quite an issue for most businesses. Maybe your parking lot isn’t too big or is crowded. The best solution is to rent out more spaces and increase the available parking spaces. Nevertheless, most urban parking areas do suffer from not having enough public spaces for parking.
Finding extra space for parking can be pretty challenging, meaning parking spaces are rented out frequently. You’ll spend hundreds of dollars in any large city to acquire a monthly lease or new space.
If your parking spaces are maximized, the best option you have is to contact the office, letting agents find out if they have available spaces or not. Alternatively, large cities usually have real estate brokers who are parking office specialists. If this is your case, you can always ask the locals to help you.
Parking management is more important than it seems
Parking management has a significant impact on the success of your business. The last thing you want is for your customers to get angry and find alternatives just because of the lack of parking they had to go through.
Other than that, you can consider charging a small fee if you own the parking lot. Try including a discount in a monthly plan or even lower prices than your competitors for the best results.
About the author:
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry for three years and has managed to write hundreds of SEO-optimized articles. Moreover, he has written articles that have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s primary concern when writing an article is to do extensive research and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.
